Yay! Zeno! It's not you or the piano. It's the student!!!!.......OK maybe its the piano! LOL Most likely the student! Paul' From: Zeno Wood <zeno.wood at gmail.com> To: caut at ptg.org Date: 12/16/2010 04:38 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] Rzewski forearm smash I was just told that a piano professor wrote in on a jury form, under "intonation", that "Zeno always does a good job"! -Z On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Paul T Williams < pwilliams4 at unlnotes.unl.edu> wrote: I don't pound hard at all when I tune. It's not ffff, but mearly an mf to f. There's no reason to pound on the piano at all. I've used the forearm smash, but conservatively. Sure with the pedal down, this will expose your tuning mistakes, but that's all you need. Then you set the pin correctly, and your good to go. Now hundreds, if not thousand or 2 of important concert tunings, and never a complaint yet! ( oh yeah, just one, but he was a major DIVA!) When Steve Brady demonstrates this technique, he doesn't get on top of the piano and smashes it!!! He pushes the damper pedal down, and "smashes" it at about forte or maybe FF. No pounding is ever needed. It's just not good for the piano or your ego. Best, Paul From: Zeno Wood <zeno.wood at gmail.com> To: caut at ptg.org Date: 12/16/2010 04:04 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] Rzewski forearm smash Agreed. It's a diagnostic tool, and I like the definition you added there, of pounding the tuning out, not in. That said, my original post was more a comment on the physicality of Rzewski's piano works. -Zeno W This appears to be a variant of the way too common misinterpretation of "pounding". Jim's description seems to be of the most common. It's not a tuning technique, or shouldn't be. It's a test of the tuning technique that got you to this test. I almost said something about it a few days ago when someone mentioned pounding a tuning in. That's exactly the wrong approach. You don't pound a tuning in. Any pounding done is an attempt to knock the tuning out, to find out how you did. It's a small flash of light into a big dark place, that might just tell you something important. The "smash" doesn't stabilize a piano, it's just a committee test blow after the fact. It also won't destabilize pitch any more than a test blow does, and won't cause a note to go out of tune the next time it's played any more than will a test blow. It's a diagnostic tool that, like a test blow, is one of the very very few indicators we have of how close we got to equalizing segment tensions during the tunings. Ron N -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101216/281ce6ff/attachment-0001.htm>
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